Rinchen Wangchuck remembers slipsliding his way down a glacier that stretched far down the mountains toward his village in the Nubra Valley, in India's far north, after school ended for the summer. Today, Wangchuck says that glacier is all but gone.

Like him, many who live in the trans-Himalayan region of Ladakh where glaciers are a part of daily life are reporting similar disquieting changes.

"As a young boy I remember the road wouldn't be open. We used to trek across the glacier. You slid a lot of the way," recalled Wangchuck, 37, now head of the environmental organisation Snow Leopard Conservancy.

Wangchuck often travels the 40 kilometres (26 miles) from Ladakh's capital Leh to the Khardung-La pass that lets into the valley and says he has watched the glacier on the north face of the Karakoram mountains shrink before his …